agnosticism

agnosticism, (from Greek agnōstos, “unknowable”), strictly speaking, the doctrine that humans cannot know of the existence of anything beyond the phenomena of their experience. The term has come to be equated in popular parlance with skepticism about religious questions in general and in particular with the rejection of traditional Christian beliefs under the impact of modern scientific thought.

The word agnosticism was first publicly coined in 1869 at a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in London by T.H. Huxley, a British biologist and champion of the Darwinian theory of evolution. He coined it as a suitable label for his own position. “It came into my head as suggestively antithetical to the ‘Gnostic’ of Church history who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.”

Nature and kinds of agnosticism

Huxley’s statement brings out both the fact that agnosticism has something to do with not knowing, and that this not knowing refers particularly to the sphere of religious doctrine. Etymology, however, and now common usage, do permit less limited uses of the term. The Soviet leader Lenin, for instance, in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908), distinguished the extremes of true Materialism on the one hand and the bold Idealism of George Berkeley, an 18th-century Idealist, on the other. He recognized as attempted halfway houses between them the “agnosticisms” of the Scottish Skeptic David Hume and the great German critical philosopher Immanuel Kant—agnosticisms that here consisted in their contentions about the unknowability of the nature, or even the existence, of “things-in-themselves” (realities beyond appearances).

Huxley’s nonreligious agnosticism

The essence of Huxley’s agnosticism—and his statement, as the inventor of the term, must be peculiarly authoritative—was not a profession of total ignorance, nor even of total ignorance within one special but very large sphere; rather, he insisted, it was “not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle,” viz., to follow reason “as far as it can take you”; but then, when you have established as much as you can, frankly and honestly to recognize the limits of your knowledge. It is the same principle as that later proclaimed in an essay on “The Ethics of Belief” (1876) by the British mathematician and philosopher of science W.K. Clifford: “It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Applied by Huxley to fundamental Christian claims, this principle yields characteristically skeptical conclusions: speaking, for example, of the Apocrypha (ancient scriptural writings excluded from the biblical canon), he wrote: “One may suspect that a little more critical discrimination would have enlarged the Apocrypha not inconsiderably.” In the same spirit, Sir Leslie Stephen, 19th-century literary critic and historian of thought, in An Agnostic’s Apology, and Other Essays (1893), reproached those who pretended to delineate “the nature of God Almighty with an accuracy from which modest naturalists would shrink in describing the genesis of a black beetle.”

Agnosticism in its primary reference is commonly contrasted with atheism thus: “The Atheist asserts that there is no God, whereas the Agnostic maintains only that he does not know.” This distinction, however, is in two respects misleading: first, Huxley himself certainly rejected as outright false—rather than as not known to be true or false—many widely popular views about God, his providence, and man’s posthumous destiny; and second, if this were the crucial distinction, agnosticism would for almost all practical purposes be the same as atheism. It was indeed on this misunderstanding that Huxley and his associates were attacked both by enthusiastic Christian polemicists and by Friedrich Engels, the co-worker of Karl Marx, as “shame-faced atheists,” a description that is perfectly applicable to many of those who nowadays adopt the more comfortable label.

Agnosticism, moreover, is not the same as Skepticism, which, in the comprehensive and classical form epitomized by the ancient Greek Skeptic Sextus Empiricus (2nd and 3rd centuries ad), confidently challenges not merely religious or metaphysical knowledge but all knowledge claims that venture beyond immediate experience. Agnosticism is, as Skepticism surely could not be, compatible with the approach of Positivism, which emphasizes the achievements and possibilities of natural and social science—though most agnostics, including Huxley, have nonetheless harboured reserves about the more authoritarian and eccentric features of the system of Auguste Comte, the 19th-century founder of Positivism.

Religious agnosticism

It is also possible to speak of a religious agnosticism. But if this expression is not to be contradictory, it has to be taken to refer to an acceptance of the agnostic principle, combined either with a conviction that at least some minimum of affirmative doctrine can be established on adequate grounds, or else with the sort of religion or religiousness that makes no very substantial or disputatious doctrinal demands. If these two varieties of agnosticism be admitted, then Huxley’s original agnosticism may be marked off from the latter as (not religious but) secular and from the former as (not religious but) atheist—construing “atheist” here as a word as wholly negative and neutral as “atypical” or “asymmetrical.” These, without pejorative insinuations, mean merely “not typical” or “not symmetrical” (the atheist is thus one who is simply without a belief in God).

Huxley himself allowed for the possibility of an agnosticism that was in these senses religious—even Christian—as opposed to atheist. Thus, in another 1889 essay “Agnosticism and Christianity,” he contrasted “scientific theology,” with which “agnosticism has no quarrel,” with “Ecclesiasticism, or, as our neighbours across the Channel call it, Clericalism”; and his complaint against the latter’s proponents was not that they reach substantive conclusions different from his own but that they maintain “that it is morally wrong not to believe certain propositions, whatever the results of strict scientific investigation of the evidence of these propositions.” The second possibility, that of an agnosticism that is religious as opposed to secular, was realized perhaps most strikingly in the Buddha (Gautama). Typically and traditionally, the ecclesiastical Christian has insisted that absolute certainty about some minimum approved list of propositions concerning God and the general divine scheme of things was wholly necessary to salvation. Equally typically, according to the tradition, the Buddha sidestepped all such speculative questions. At best they could only distract attention from the urgent business of salvation—salvation, of course, in his own very different interpretation.

Historical antecedents of modern agnosticism

It is convenient to distinguish the antecedents of secular agnosticism from those of religious agnosticism.

Antecedents of secular agnosticism

The ancestry of modern secular and atheist agnosticism may be traced back to the Sophists and to Socrates in the 5th century bc; not, of course, the “Socrates” of Plato’s Republic—the would-be founding father of an ideal totalitarian state—but the shadowy historical Socrates supposedly hailed by the oracle of Apollo’s Delphi as the wisest of men—who knew what, and how much, he did not know. But the most important and immediate source of such agnostic ideas was surely Hume, while Hume’s successor Kant may well be seen as the prime philosophical inspirer of religious reactions against them.

Huxley, as noted above, demanded that a thinker recognize and accept the limits of his knowledge. In taking it that these limits do not include either the findings of a general positive natural theology or the contents of a particular special divine revelation, Huxley was accepting a Humean critique. (It is significant that Huxley’s study of Hume was the most sympathetic appraisal to be published in the 19th century.) Hume’s critique is found in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first published in 1748 under another title), which attempts, in the manner of Locke and later Kant, to determine the limits of man’s possible knowledge, and in his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).

Two sections of the Enquiry refer directly to these limits: “Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State” and “Of Miracles.” In the first, Hume starts from his basic Empiricist claims: that, generally, “matters of fact and real existence” cannot be known a priori (prior to and apart from experience); and that, particularly, one cannot know a priori that any thing or kind of thing either must be or cannot be the cause of any other thing or kind of thing. These considerations dispose of all the classical arguments for the existence of God other than the argument to design—that the structure and order of the universe and its constituents implies a design and a designer. But here, Hume urges, argument from experience can find no purchase because both the supposed effect, the universe as a whole, and the putative cause, God, are essentially unique and incomparable. Later, in his Dialogues, he develops the suggestion—which he acknowledges as stemming from the 3rd-century-bc philosopher Strato of Lampsacus, next but one after Aristotle as head of his Lyceum—that whatever order man discerns should be attributed to the universe itself and not to any postulated outside cause.

In the section “Of Miracles,” Hume takes his stand on the agnostic principle: “A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence.” He then argues that no attempt to appeal to the alleged occurrence of miracles—conceived as authoritative endorsements by a power beyond and greater than nature—can succeed in establishing the truth of a claim to constitute special divine revelation. Hume’s distinctive contribution here is methodological: the contention that the principles and presuppositions upon which the critical historian must rely, in first interpreting the remains of the past as historical evidence and in then building up from this evidence his account of what actually happened, are such as to make it impossible for him “to prove a miracle and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.”

In this two-phase attack, Hume challenged what was in his day, and long remained, the standard framework for systematic Christian apologetics. Indeed, the contrary contentions—of the possibilities, both of developing a positive natural theology and of establishing the authenticity of a supposed revelation by discovering endorsing miracles—were defined as essential and constitutive dogmas of Roman Catholicism by decrees of the first Vatican Council of 1869–70.

In view of the future history of Western thought, it must be emphasized that Hume’s position, like Kant’s, was (officially) that knowledge in this area is practically impossible. This thesis is stronger than that of those who simply confess that they just do not know:

The God-men say when die go sky

Through pearly gates where river flow,

The God-men say when die we fly

Just like eagle, hawk and crow—

Might be, might be; I don’t know.

(Aboriginal song from the Northern Territory, Australia.)

Yet Hume’s thesis was, on the other hand, weaker than that of his 20th-century neo-Humean successors, the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, who held that any talk about a transcendent God must be “without literal significance.” This view was presented brilliantly, and in an uncompromisingly drastic form, by A.J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic (2nd ed., 1946). Similar conclusions were reached less high-handedly by several contributors to New Essays in Philosophical Theology (ed. by A. Flew and A. MacIntyre, 1955).

Antecedents of religious agnosticism

Looking backward, it is possible now to see what Hume himself did not know—that his attack on the possibility of a positive natural theology had to a considerable extent been anticipated by 14th-century Christian Scholastics: generally, by William of Ockham; and, with particular reference to the lack of a priori knowledge of causal relations, by Nicholas of Autrecourt.

The claims of Hume and Kant—and, indeed, those of the logical positivists and their successors—about the practical, or theoretical, impossibility of such knowledge should also be compared with the long traditions of “negative theology.” Such a theology maintains that the nature of God passes so far beyond the comprehension of any creature that God must be characterized largely or entirely by indirection—as Infinite, as Incomparable, and so on. Thus Thomas Aquinas, the foremost Scholastic of the 13th century—who contrived on other occasions to tell his readers as much as his most practical church could wish about the deeds, plans, and demands of the Ineffable—nevertheless had his agnostic moments as well. But he did elaborate a doctrine of so-called analogical predication designed to show how it is possible for finite creatures to say and to understand something positive about God by means of comparisons with known entities or qualities. By contrast, the 12th-century philosopher Moses Maimonides, often dubbed anachronistically “the Jewish Aquinas,” had been much more drastic than his successor, “the Christian Maimonides,” in his insistence that everything that can be truly said about the Creator—not excluding the proposition that he exists—has to be construed as purely negative.

Although it is clearly possible to speak of a religious agnosticism without self-contradiction, the foregoing considerations suggest the difficulty of intermingling religious and agnostic concerns. The easiest case is that in which the religion is altogether without metaphysical content: thus, one of Huxley’s biographers reports that the 19th-century Scottish sage Thomas Carlyle “taught him that a deep sense of religion was compatible with an entire absence of theology.” The next simplest case is that in which worship is combined with a total noncommitment about the attributes of the object of worship:

He is not a male: He is not a female: He is not a neuter.

He is not to be seen: He neither is nor is not.

When He is sought He will take the form in which

He is sought.

It is indeed difficult to describe the name of the Lord.

(Poem from the Telugu, inscribed on a cult

object in the Royal Ontario Museum.)

In its original setting this expression of a Hindu piety has power and charm. Yet its intellectual inadequacy becomes manifest when the doctrine of the Unknowable in the broad synthetic system of Herbert Spencer, a late-19th-century evolutionary philosopher, is recalled. For to affirm, as Spencer did, the existence of a being about whom absolutely nothing else can be said is a rather comical hypostatization (taking of an abstraction as real), which is surely indiscernible from affirming no being at all. Nor, perhaps, is it any great improvement to aver that much else can indeed be said about him, but only in words that here must bear an extraordinary meaning—unless, of course, those meanings can be specified. It was the suggestion that the goodness of God might thus be goodness in a quite unusual sense—what would elsewhere be called badness—that provoked the ire of John Stuart Mill, a mid-19th-century Empiricist, against certain developments from Sir William Hamilton’s “Philosophy of the Unconditioned.” Mill wrote: “I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures.”

The third, and surely the most promising, way in which the reconciliation may be attempted is by essaying some distinction between the essence or the internal nature of God and his external relations with the creation. It may then be suggested that, whereas man’s knowledge of the former must be at least exiguous and at worst simply lacking, he can nevertheless know as much as he needs to know about the latter. As to the rest, he should be reverently agnostic.

Incompatibility with fideism

What cannot, however, by any means be squared with agnosticism in Huxley’s sense are attempts to transmute the very limitations of human knowledge into grounds for accepting some wholly unevidenced faith. Such transmutations have been made in the interests of many mutually irreconcilable systems, and they apparently remain perennially attractive to thinkers with a different understanding of the ethics of belief.

St. Augustine of Hippo, near the end of the 5th century, felt the challenge of classical Skepticism in Cicero’s Academica and De natura deorum (“On the Nature of the Gods”) and gave his response in Contra academicos (“Against the Academics”). Skepticism, he thought, can be overcome only by revelation. The orthodox Muslim philosopher and mystic al-Ghazālī (late 11th century) deployed Skeptical arguments similarly, as a propaedeutic, or study preparatory to the acceptance of his rival revelation. With the rediscovery in the 16th century of the works of Sextus Empiricus, a course of Skepticism became commonly a preliminary to fideist commitment. Fideism is the thesis that truth in religion is accessible only to faith. The course persuaded the inquirer that reason cannot attain truth; yet certainty in true religious belief was still thought absolutely necessary for salvation. Martin Luther was speaking for his times (first half of the 16th century) when he thundered against the extremely cautious and restricted agnosticism of Desiderius Erasmus, foremost figure of the northern Renaissance: “Spiritus sanctus non est Skepticus” (“The Holy Spirit is not a Skeptic”).

The only resort was, it seemed, faith: whether the easygoing Roman Catholic faith of the 16th-century Skeptic Michel de Montaigne; the polemical Counter-Reformation fervour of his contemporary Gentian Hervet, veteran of the Council of Trent and Latin translator of the Adversus mathematicos (1569; “Against the Pundits”) of Sextus Empiricus; or, one century later, the vestigial Huguenot loyalty of Pierre Bayle—stocker of a great arsenal of secular argument, the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–97).

The decisive objection to any and every such rationally unfounded flight into faith was posed by John Locke, the 17th-century British Empiricist, who set a tone of coolly unfervent Anglicanism for the following century:

We may as well doubt of our being, as we can whether any revelation from God be true. So that faith is a settled and sure principle of assent and assurance, and leaves no room for doubt or hesitation. Only we must be sure that it be a divine revelation, and that we understand it right: else we shall expose ourselves to all the extravagancy of enthusiasm, and all the error of wrong principles . . . (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, ch. xvi, 14).

Many thinkers have agreed that it is all very well to depreciate the potentialities of unaided natural reason and to insist that if man is to have any knowledge of God this must depend largely or wholly upon whatever special steps God may have taken to reveal himself; and they have also agreed that, if man’s commitment of faith is not to be arbitrary and frivolous, then he clearly must have some good reason for believing, first, that there is a God who has so revealed himself, and, second, that his preferred candidate—and not one of its innumerable rivals—truly is that revelation.

These points are crucial—both for the appreciation of the history of ideas and for a reasonable contemporary understanding. Clearly, they were upheld by Aquinas, who in the Summa contra gentiles—before proceeding to present his own reasons for accepting Christianity, rather than Islām, as the authentic revelation—applied that same word frivolous to any such unsupportable commitment. Again, Judah ha-Levi, an early 12th-century Jewish poet and philosopher, has been authoritatively described as “concerned to bring men to a mystical and non-rational appreciation of religious truths” by his Skeptical attacks on the established Aristotelian natural theology. Yet ha-Levi’s main work, entitled Kuzari: The Book of Proof and Argument in Defence of the Despised Faith, does in fact offer rational evidences of the truth of Judaism.

Skeptical propaedeutics to faith are now out of fashion. But the same challenge applies to all of the various responses to Kant’s famous invitation: “I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason). Natural theology may, indeed, for Hume’s reasons as reinforced by Kant, be impossible. The way of religious discovery may indeed be mystical experience, personal encounter with the divine Thou, or whatever else. But there is, and can be, no substitute for a man’s having some sound grounds for identifying his experience not only as really mystical but also as experience of the real God; for holding his faith in some putative revelation not only to be real religious faith but also to be faith in a genuine revelation of the Real; and so on.

Rejections of the agnostic principle

Anyone who insists on the foregoing touchstones may still be agnostic as well as religious. What cannot consist with agnosticism is a calculated commitment to faith seen as altogether without evidential warrant. The classic example of such commitment was provided in the 17th century by the Wager Argument of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who assumed, for the sake of the argument, that “reason can decide nothing here” and then urged that the only sane bet is Roman Catholicism; for we have nothing but this one short life to lose, and all eternity to win.

Pascal’s Wager Argument is unsound because, on its own stated assumption of total and inescapable ignorance, the gambler is not entitled to limit the betting options to two—and to one particular two, at that. A similarly parochial inattention to the variety of candidacies for belief has characterized most fideists. Thus Søren Kierkegaard, an influential mid-19th-century Danish lay theologian, happily glorified the essential irrationality of religious faith, while taking it always that faith will, of course, be Protestant. Elsewhere, Pascal himself did notice, and tried to meet, some of the competition; his neglect here is the more remarkable because his wager was originally imported into Christendom from Islām (see Miguel Palacios, Los precedentes de Pari de Pascal). What makes it a landmark is that it constituted a direct, reasoned rejection of the agnostic principle—a rejection in which the reason proposed for believing was explicitly a motive for self-persuasion rather than some evidence of truth. Thus, when William James, a pre-World War I American psychologist and philosopher, in The Will to Believe, developed the best known systematic attack on that principle it was, rightly, Pascal whom he hailed as his first inspiration. James distinguished those hypotheses that, for any individual, represent psychologically “live options” from those that do not, and he urged that, when evidential grounds are lacking, the choice may properly be determined by one’s passional nature. For men often have to act on some unproved hypothesis, and sometimes such firm commitments may help to make the belief come true. Consider, for example, some belief that a man is trustworthy. The objections are that belief in the existence of God is clearly not of this case, and generally that to act decisively on some hypothesis does not require the agent to believe it as a known truth.